When I was a boy, I was a fan of first the New York Yankees baseball team and then the Baltimore Orioles baseball and Colts football teams. I was a pretty good baseball and football player and loved playing both games. I was lucky to see the legends play on their home fields: Mickey Mantle, Brooks Robinson, and Johnny Unitas.

Then I grew up. Now that I’m an adult, I have no interest in professional team sports. Adults sound infantile when they gush about a pro ball team. Don’t these jock sniffers understand that any team will jump ship when a better tax break is offered by another city? Ditto the players? There is no team or player allegiance. Why cheer for any pro team?

Most pro teams are owned by closely held corporations. It makes more sense to watch their share prices and cheer for each uptick.

I never understood the obsession grown men have with sports. And it’s not just pro sports, even amateur college teams have fanatics. Why? Are these guys just living vicariously through people more talented than them? Are they trying to escape their own meager life with mindless hobbies? Or are they just conforming to the interests they think a man ought to have? The passion people have for a bunch of guys throwing a ball around is astounding.

Lucius Petillius Clarus added,

“We won, we won!” you’ll hear superfans say.

No you pathetic second-hander, “you” didn’t win. A group of highly paid men playing for money beat another group of highly paid men playing for money. They’re not even from your city. You don’t know them and they don’t know you. They don’t give a fuck about you beyond getting you to pay $50 for a jersey and $150 to see one of their games.

I do like other sports, though. Swimming, water polo, water skiing, surfing, cycling, hiking, self defense. Most of these sports demand fitness, which requires sustained training. They also require strategy, reflexes, and technique. Most involve little or no money. Most attract few spectators.

Some of my peers like to golf, or bowl, or snow ski. They call them sports. I call them pastimes. (I played golf as a teenager. My mother and I always walked; I can’t imagine riding in a golf cart! Golf is okay . . . if you’re a sissy.) Russians call chess a sport, which is silly.

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I’ve always been bothered by painful muscle cramps in my legs after strenuous exercise. They wake me at night after a hard day of hiking, biking, or swimming. Occasionally they’ll occur during a long hard bike ride or a hard swim workout. For decades I thought that I’d just have to tolerate the pain. Yes, some cyclists fill their water bottles with Gatorade, but it’s loaded with sugar. I thought that it was a useless gimmick. I’ve tried gorging on bananas to replace lost potassium, with no apparent effect.

Dave at Lauderdale Cyclery suggested that I try drinking a solution of Gu Brew and water (one tablet per water bottle) while cycling. I was skeptical, but was pleased to find that It actually works! No more cramps at night, and only occasional minimal hints of cramps when after a flip-turn, I push off the pool wall.

I drink this solution when swimming, cycling . . . any form of exercise. I wish that I’d discovered it earlier. The tablets are available in a variety of flavors. I don’t have a favorite flavor; I like them all.

I was thinking about biking and how much pleasure it’s been over the decades, from my first tricycle, through my 20-inch bike with training wheels, through a succession of bikes of all types.

One emotion runs through my memories of all of my bikes: freedom. The only bad memories involve headwinds. Hours and hours of headwinds.

In the 1960s I attended college in the middle of Kansas. I had no car, and saved my money for a new Schwinn Continental (a gorgeous but heavy 10-speed bike). I’d regularly ride that bike about 20 miles to Salina, KS. The roads were flat, but the never-ending wind was a killer. I’d not yet learned about the near-necessity of padded bicycle shorts or gloves. The rides would just beat me up, especially if I faced a headwind both northbound and southbound. (Yes, it happened sometimes — a front would come through and the wind would shift direction by 180 degrees. Result? Forty miles in first and second gear!)

Last month I was amused to find a Kansas bicycle podcast and the first thing that they mentioned was the difficulty of cycling into the wind. That persistent Kansas wind.

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David Byrne (once the Talking Heads guitarist/singer, now world music producer) is an avid bicyclist. While on concert tour, he uses his folding bike to explore the local color. A few years ago he assembled his worldwide bike travel notes into a book titled Bicycle Diaries.

You can listen to him read a chapter from his book. David Byrne reads his Australia chapter from his 2009 book, Bicycle Diaries. I like his transportation philosophy: use a bicycle when it’s appropriate, such as in urban settings and for short to medium length rides. Use other transport modes when they make more sense.

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I called the America’s Cup competition in San Francisco Bay wrong. So did almost everyone else. Larry Ellison’s Oracle Team USA’s 72-foot long catamaran recovered from an 8 to 1 deficit to Emirates Team New Zealand and won. Yes, OTUSA came back from certain defeat to win sailing’s most prestigious trophy by a score of 9 to 8.

Every aspect of this year’s America’s Cup was controversial.

The “USA” in the Oracle Team USA moniker is meaningless; OTUSA’s onboard crew consists of exactly one American and nine Kiwis and Aussies. Its helmsman is an Australian. The OTUSA crew list reveals that this is a corporate — not a national — team.

Most potential teams stayed home because of costs. Larry reportedly spent upwards of $200 million.

Tbe boats look like trampolines.

The crews are dressed in helmets and what appear to be NASCAR driving suits.

The “yachts” and the racing resembled Formula One more than yachting. Have a look at the final race on YouTube.

There’s really no rational reason for someone who isn’t from New Zealand and/or some type of robber baron to care even one bit about the America’s Cup, or to root for Larry Ellison and his team of sailing carpetbaggers.

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I’ve been riding my bike more and now that the rainy season has arrived, staying dry is often a challenge. Wunderground.com is a fantastic resource: you can display moving real-time radar scans of your neighborhood. At least here in south Florida, these give me a good idea of where it’s raining, and the direction in which the rain is moving. Wunderground has a mobile adaptive interface, so it’s just the ticket to use on my smartphone while cycling! (Of course, I come to a safe stop first, well off the roadway.)

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I’ve ridden bicycles for decades and thought that I understood their maintenance. One procedure that I have trouble with is derailleur adjustment, so when my Trek 7900 hybrid bike’s rear derailleur stopped shifting smoothly, I took it to Miguel Escobar, the chief mechanic at a Fort Lauderdale bike shop.

I expected that Miguel would carefully adjust my bike’s rear derailleur. Instead, after noticing that both up- and down- shifts were erratic, Miguel began carefully cleaning my bike’s freewheel, followed by cleaning and lubricating the chain.

I thought that clean freewheels and chains looked nice, but aside from reducing friction, I wasn’t aware that they affected gear shifting. I was wrong. Miguel pointed out that dirt and oil form a sticky paste that glues the chain to each cog on the freewheel, so the chain doesn’t obediently follow the rider’s shift commands.

He’s right. After the freewheel cog cleaning, the bike shifts gears smoothly. I still have lessons to learn, even on relatively simple devices.

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Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!